YMMV / The Nutcracker in 3D

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • Close your eyes and the Rat King's torture of NC sounds like the most wrong thing ever. "Open your mouth... like a good little prince!"
  • Frau Eva saying to Mary: "Get changed, something nice... I'll help you."
• Angst Aversion: A common criticism of the movie is that the Darker and Edgier take on the Rat King and his followers, particularly the use of Nazi imagery (including labor camps and massive piles of burning toys), isn't compelling enough to make up for the massive clash with the source material's whimsical tone, as most people don't go into any version of The Nutcracker wanting to think about the Holocaust. It's especially off-putting since this film is marketed as a family movie.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: The Nutcracker is already considered a Hard-to-Adapt Work, featuring not much in the way of plot and being mostly a showcase of tightly-choreographed dancing. However, this rendition earned particular criticism for its attempt at updating the work, foregoing the original Tchaikovsky compositions and ballet (which had long been major selling points of The Nutcracker) in favor of contemporary pop and featuring a Holocaust allegory subplot that came off as inappropriately heavy for what was ostensibly a holiday film for kids. All of these were cited as elements that drove away potential viewers, resulting in the film losing a whopping $69.5 million at the box office.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The group of random Russian Cossack dolls who randomly appear as the sleigh is coming up the tree. They wish the leads "Mary Christmas" then hurl themselves off the trees like lemmings, to the tune of Tchaikovsky's "Cossack Dance", played at double-speed on kazoos.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Director/writer Andrey Konchalovskiy deliberately combined the original story of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King with themes of Nazism and The Holocaust. It didn't do well with audiences in any country, although in all fairness, Konchalovskiy never suggests that Nazism is a good or moral thing (it's only applied to the villains, who are portrayed as eccentric, creepy and disturbing).
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The movie ends on a positive note with Mary and Nicholas Charles ice skating together... but the story is set in 1920 Austria, which will be annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938. And Mary being Albert Einstein's niece means she's at least partially Jewish.
• Funny Moments: The Rat King figuratively pulling the length of his empire out of his ass.
• Ham and Cheese: John Turturro's performance as the Rat King, when he isn't frightening children. He owns it, reaching "delicious" M. Bison levels. Maybe he thought he was actually doing Springtime For Ratler?
• No Yay: Mary and NC's weird flirting while he's still a creepy doll of ambiguous age. The Rat King seems to flirt with her a bit too ("I hope you’re saving the last dance for me") and so does Gielgud the chimp.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Some people think that Mary has gotten an Adaptation Name Change from Clara in the original ballet. That actually isn't the case, "Mary" was the name of the little girl in the original book, while "Clara" was the name of her doll. The ballet simply decided to combine the two "characters".
  • Oddly enough, this is not the first film to insert Albert Einstein into a setting via making him a relative to one of the main characters for seemingly no other reason than to make the audience go "Oh look, it's Albert Einstein!" I.Q. is a 1994 Romantic Comedy set in The '50s in which Einstein is made the uncle of the female lead.
• Questionable Casting: In a work based on a ballet, the actor who dances the most would be... John Turturro? He had a double for some harder moves, but what he did do was much more, and of a much better quality, than you'd expect.
• So Bad, It's Good: Get the right group of friends to riff it with, don't fear the nut-related jokes, and this flick is more fun than spiked eggnog.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The CGI (especially during the snowflake dance) and the costumes of the Christmas ornaments look extremely shoddy. The Nutcracker himself, in particular, is horrible, being blatantly composited onto the background in a way that doesn't look even slightly convincing and clashes blatantly with the real-world sets.
  • The robot rat-dogs eating through the tree is especially terrible, there's only a horribly-fake wood chips particle spray effect to cover up the fact that the dogs' faces are blatantly clipping through the tree. You can also clearly see John Turturro's stunt double doing the flip off the table in his first song; and the pirouette, followed by a bit of more complex footwork, in the second.
  • In one scene, the Rat King electrocutes his pet shark for no good reason, causing its corpse to float to the top of the tank. In the very next scene, the shark is back at the bottom of the tank as if nothing happened. Even worse? The animators forgot to animate it, causing it to sit there motionlessly in background!
• Squick: The rambling reminiscence Frau Eva relates to Mary, about youthful indiscretion and spontaneous combustion.
• Sweetness Aversion: The crowd song after the rats are defeated, which doesn't at all match the film's dark tone.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Given that the villains are Nazi rats armed with wacky technology, this movie features probably the closest thing to a live action version of the Skaven we have seen so far.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The horribly out-of-place "the Rats are Nazis" plotline could have actually served a purpose and helped the movie if the real-world horrors of the actual Nazis was used as a thematic parallel to the fantastical evil of the Rat King in Mary's dream world similarly to the allegorical villains of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or Pan's Labyrinth. Instead, the actual Third Reich goes completely unmentioned and the Nazi rat plotline isn't used for anything more original than "we'll make the rats look like Nazis because Nazis are bad."
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Andrei Konchalovsky famously spent twenty years trying to get this film made and saw it as his magnum opus, hoping it would be a film that would be beloved by kids and adults for generations to come. The fact that the end result was so poorly received is honestly pretty heartbreaking.
• Unfortunate Character Design:
  • Why does the Nutcracker form of the Prince resemble a Canadian from South Park?
  • It's a mystery what the hell the filmmakers were even going for with Tinker's design, but they probably weren't thinking about making him look so much like John Wayne Gacy.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Uncle Albert giving Mary's father a pebble and claiming it's the same one he had when he was a child is supposed to be a whimsical and heartwarming Magic Feather act, but it comes across more like him emotionally manipulating his own brother by capitalizing on a painful childhood memory.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: It's The Nutcracker with a town taken over by disturbing sharp-toothed Nazi rats who burn toys to make children cry, but it's marketed as a family film.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: The fairy's tinfoil dress; Tinker's disturbing resemblance to serial killer John Wayne Gacy; Mary's easily-ripped and see-through clothes; the Rat King's resemblance to Andy Warhol; the Rat Queen's weird wigs.

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